I listened to the presenation today given by Oleg and there was one slide in there that showed 4 different sizes of Thumbnails. I thought I read somewhere that server would generate a thumbnail exactly for that size of the field on the layout.

But after seeing the presentation today I think that might be different. It looks like the server might be generating 4 possible sizes to be used instead. But maybe that was just a slide showing that it can generate different sizes.

So my question is does it generate custom thumbnails or does it generate the next smallest one? I would probably think it genrates the next closest one. But not sure.

FM Server 12 will generate a thumbnail of the size needed for the specific field on the specific layout.

Oleg's demo screen was to show the realtive file sizes which might be required -- highlighting the advantage of sending only the optimized thumbnail over the network, as opposed to how it worked in earlier versions where the larger file data was sent to the client for rendering.

This is possible, and I have done it with an intermediary step involving a second container field:

Using the new Container Functions, set the content of a second container to actually contain a file of the thumbnail show in the first container -- GetThumbnail ( fully documented in Help ). Then export the content of that second container, and you will get the actual thumbnail as an image file outside of FileMaker.